Monday Night Football, Patriots at Dolphins: Is Brady Too Old To Win a Title?

Ron Borges did a statistical study on Super Bowl winning quarterback ages. I’ll let that sink in for a minute. Basically, he implies that Super Bowl winning quarterbacks have gotten younger in the salary cap era, and few have won a championship at Brady’s age or older. He also describes Bill Belichick as finding it interesting.

I’m pretty sure he doesn’t get Belichick’s sarcasm when Bill says ““Seventeen years? That’s a pretty good sample.” Anyway, the average age of a Super Bowl winning QB before 1994 was 30.5. The average age since 1994 is 29.0. Of course, the biggest issue here is population size.

For example, if I look at just starting quarterbacks who threw 400 passes in a season and were at or above the league average in adjusted net yards per attempt (a pretty good sample of where the Super Bowl winning QB’s will come from), there have been 245 QB seasons. 12.6% of them were turned in by QB’s age 35 or older. The fact that John Elway won 2 of the 17 at an older age, then, is not remarkable given the population.

There are more 29 year old starting quarterbacks who are above average, than 35 year olds. (There are also a lot more below average ones). Just consider this year. Who are the likely candidates at QB to win? Brady, and a bunch of guys in their late 20’s and early 30’s. That doesn’t mean that Brady is less likely to win than any particular one of them.

New England will be fine as long as Brady plays well, and it won’t matter how old he is. Some day it will end, but until then, he’s just in the minority, but still capable of winning.